Star: How Mishima Gives Feeling a Body

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoiler note: This essay discusses Star in full, including its ending.

After a successful take, the young actor’s assistant offers him tea. The train has passed at the right moment, he has delivered his line, and the director’s approval sounds reasonably sincere. She holds out a metal thermos. In its polished surface, the crowd becomes a smear of faces; when she opens it, steam clouds the metal around the mouth. Then his confidence clouds over too.

We have barely finished looking at the condensation before confidence begins to waver. The thermos belongs to the ordinary business of the set, which makes the transfer feel discovered in passing.

There is a considerable distance between knowing what people feel and finding prose that lets another person experience it. Star crosses that distance repeatedly. Its first-person voice combines an almost cold scrutiny with a susceptibility to texture, color, bodily pressure, and sudden resemblance. The narrator can be vain and unpleasant company, but it is hard to stop looking where he looks.

He is Yutaka Mizuno in the Japanese naming and Andreea Sion’s Romanian translation, though Sam Bett’s English version calls him Rikio Mizuno. The English quotations here come from Bett. Yutaka Mizuno and Yukio Mishima share the initials Y. M. in Western name order: an inviting author-character echo, although the resemblance cannot by itself establish a deliberate code. The more interesting intimacy is in the writing, where an actor’s alertness to appearances becomes the occasion for a novelist’s extraordinary attention.

The touch behind the metaphor

Kayo, the actor’s assistant and secret lover, has two silver front teeth. When she laughs in the dark, they resemble moonlight. That might have remained a decorative comparison, but Yutaka sometimes touches them to reassure himself that they are false. Then his reasoning slips: he has never touched the moon, so how does he know its surface would feel any different?

Sight suggests a likeness; touch seems to settle the question; an absurd but perfectly intelligible objection unsettles it again. His preference for fakes acquires the small physical satisfaction of a finger meeting metal. By the time he tells us he wants artifice, we have already followed him through its appeal.

The same precision makes his attraction to Kayo’s ankle convincing. Initially he sees roughness, discoloration, a chestnut’s bulk, the knot in old wood. He lifts her foot and kisses it. The dry, resistant thing changes under his lips, becoming a yellow rose or the carved wooden face of a Buddha; beneath the skin he senses cool bone. These comparisons would be extravagant if they just accumulated around a stationary object. Here they register the changing encounter between his mouth and her body. A surface he has described almost harshly becomes desirable through contact.

The scrutiny is unsparing even as sensation carries him beyond his first judgment. He can inventory an unlovely ankle and still be overcome by kissing it. Mishima gives both responses room within the same passage, without smoothing their incompatibility into a more flattering account of desire.

The detail seems beyond the reach of a recipe. Adding a color or a texture would not, by itself, reproduce the ankle’s transformation. The rose takes shape as the hard, dry surface yields to the kiss; the cool bone is felt through the skin. Each detail belongs to a stage of the contact, so that description unfolds as desire.

A town that feels remembered

The studio sequence extends that power from a body to an entire landscape. Yutaka is playing a gangster who leaves a woman behind and walks out to face death. The production has its numbered scene and shot, its camera rail, its adjusted gesture at a doorframe. Once filming begins, he describes himself as “deep inside a dream.”

We remain on a film set, but its familiar unreality starts to fail him. Neon flashes unevenly across the empty streets. A partition partly blocks his view of a mirror covered with red cloth. A door hangs at a subtly wrong angle. He asks what could have made the town so quiet, as though its stillness had a history beyond the crew’s preparations.

That question gives the scenery an inhabited past. A constructed street begins to feel remembered, and memory supplies connections the camera cannot show: somewhere beyond these alleys there must be railway tracks, a city, a harbor, the sea. His character’s expectation of death lends the visible town the poignancy of a place about to be lost.

The pleasure lies in becoming absorbed enough to share this change. We know where we are and still begin to feel that something has opened beyond the studio walls. The dream is the actor’s immersion, sustained by a prose attentive enough to make painted façades seem capable of sheltering unseen lives.

What the light leaves out

Then a door opens, and a young woman appears in a periwinkle cocktail dress.

Yuri Asano is visible in pieces. Her nose and eyebrows are obscured, while her eyes and lips remain distinct. Only a small area of her body emerges above the dress; her black hair merges with the darkness under the eaves. Mishima is as precise about what the darkness conceals as about what the light reveals.

With the surrounding face obscured, the eyes and lips hold our attention in isolation. The darkness lends her something of the town’s strangeness. Before Yutaka knows who she is, he is already drawn to her; the prose has traced this attraction through light and shadow before he names it as love.

Her entrance breaks the predictability of the set. He knows the script and expects its future to obey him. This woman steps outside that expectation. When she calls his own name rather than his character’s and embraces him, the supposed town seems conclusively real.

The director’s shout of “Cut!” brings out the hidden workers. Faces emerge from windows and scenery; the lighting crew appears overhead. What felt like an inhabited town is suddenly a workplace full of people watching an interruption. Mishima lets the same architecture support both experiences, with the command changing everything we can see in it.

Yuri is a struggling actress who has forced her way into the scene. The director tries to exploit the interruption by writing her into the film, but she cannot repeat it. Under instruction, her body stiffens. The living presence Yutaka found irresistible disappears as soon as everyone expects a performance.

That reversal has an uglier continuation. Later, during a medical emergency after Yuri’s suicide attempt, he finds her involuntary movements natural and compelling again. Kayo subsequently imitates her distress for their private amusement; by morning, the publicity office has rewritten the incident as a romance centered on him.

His cruelty unsettles our earlier pleasure in Yuri’s appearance. His exquisite attention has told us very little about her as a person; her suffering becomes another spectacle for him. He sees with extraordinary precision and remains indifferent to the person before him. We share his attraction before seeing what his way of looking costs Yuri.

When Kayo explains the spell

Toward the end, some of that uncertainty diminishes. Youth, artifice, the mask, the wish for death: the concerns become more conspicuous, and Kayo eventually gives an extended account of the arrangement that sustains a star. The public receives an image; the secret lovers preserve the artifice behind it; reality waits for its stars to die and be replaced.

There is intelligence in the speech, and explanation has been present throughout the book. Yutaka’s voice is already analytical in the opening pages. Kayo now gathers too much of the preceding drama into a tidy explanation. After Yuri’s interruption, her failed retakes, and the publicity office’s appropriation of her distress, the machinery of manufactured reality scarcely needs this much exposition. The characters begin to sound more settled about their world than their experiences have made us feel.

The loss is one of surprise. Earlier, an ankle could change under a kiss, or a stranger could make a set acquire a future. Mishima’s familiar preoccupations increasingly dictate what a scene will mean. Beauty points toward decay, public appearance toward the mask, exhaustion toward death. The ideas remain powerful, but we can now foresee where each image will lead.

Still, the late pages resist a complete dismissal. Jan Wilm calls the studio flag scene the novella’s “epiphanic high point.” His enthusiasm identifies something the broader disappointment can obscure. The sapphire flag alternately slackens and snaps against the sky, and Yutaka’s sadness develops through watching that unstable movement. Even this late, Mishima can give a troubled feeling a physical rhythm before explaining it.

Two chairs away

The final barber scene recovers a subtler version of that strength. Snipping scissors make Yutaka drowsy. A cut strand falls across his vision like a bird’s shadow. His thoughts loosen until he starts to question whether the absent Kayo exists, then whether he exists himself. These doubts follow the drift of a mind falling asleep.

When he wakes, an older star, Aijiro Kokura, is sitting two chairs away. Daylight and the mirror expose what makeup, lighting, and camera angles usually conceal. Yutaka notices slack skin, creases beneath the eyes, a mouth that must be held shut to preserve its youthful line. The fear of aging is becoming a face that is close enough to inspect.

This is familiar Mishima territory, and the narrator’s language about a mask makes the destination explicit. Yet the arrangement retains its force. The book opened with the crowd contained in a little mirror and Kayo filling the space around his reflection. At the barber’s, another actor’s body gives him a future he cannot direct. Kayo returns to promise that she will still call him handsome at sixty, repeating an assurance she offered much earlier.

Her loyalty survives the repetition. Its comfort has changed and we have now seen Kokura. Star is less enchanting when it explains the system behind its images, but we can watch as its last room still contains more than the explanation can settle: the lover making her promise, the young man listening, and the older face sitting only two chairs away.

For another entrance into Mishima, the Japanese literature reading guide introduces Confessions of a Mask alongside five other starting points.

Sources

Yukio Mishima, Star, translated by Sam Bett (New Directions, 2019), ebook, sections 1–5. All English quotations and the close readings above refer to this edition; section numbers are used because EPUB pagination varies.

Naming: Yukio Mishima, Starul, translated by Andreea Sion (Humanitas Fiction, 2023), publisher sample, printed p. 10; Shinchosha’s December 2020 Nami discussion, “殉教” subsection, identifies the protagonist as 水野豊, Mizuno Yutaka in Japanese name order. The initials observation is an interpretation, not an established statement of authorial intent.

Jan Wilm, “All the World’s a Stage: On Yukio Mishima’s ‘Star’”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2019.